Save the world? Drive electric!

International Politics of Natural Resources and the Environment research programme

The less
people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep at
night, Otto von Bismarck is said to have quipped. The documentary ‘Who Killed
the Electric Car?’ draws its power from the stupefied sense of outrage 19th
century Prussians probably did not get to experience much. Director Chris Paine
presents the history of the EV1, marketed for the first time by the US car
manufacturer General Motors in 1996. The car ran entirely on battery power and
thus produced literally no exhaust. Still, by late 2005 the entire fleet of these
wonder cars was gone. Paine’s documentary seeks to explain the political
mechanics behind the disappearance of these automobiles.

The story
begins with the California Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate of 1990, demanding that
10% of all cars sold in California
in the year 2003 emit no pollutants. Car manufacturers coped with this act by
adopting a two-pronged strategy: attempting to produce such cars on the one
hand, while litigating for the abolishment of the act on the other hand. As mentioned
already, electrical vehicles became a reality already in 1996, but in spite of
this legal action against the mandate continued until, with the support of the US federal
government, the Zero Emissions Act was repealed on April 24, 2003.

In what
turned out to be a major victory for Detroit, manufacturers
wrested a memorandum from the state of California
entitling them to build and sell electric cars in accordance with demand. GM
then proceeded to prove this demand non-existent through a marketing campaign
that consisted in placing phone calls to potential customers who had been waitlisted
for leases, and explaining the vehicles’ limitations to them. Customers who did
not relent in their intent to buy subsequently had to face a puzzling application
process – inquiring even about their medical history.

In fact, the
limitations of the EV1 and cars like it are minute: they are the same size as a
regular car; they were just as powerful as them and accelerated much faster than
their gas-driven counterparts. Their limited range – still much superior to the
average needs of commuters – was due to GM’s initial refusal to install more
efficient batteries into their cars. With more modern NiMH batteries the car
could go for up to 260 km without recharging. Charging them fully indeed took a
lot of time, but it could be done overnight with equipment that could easily be
installed in owners’ garages.

The death
blow to electric cars came once customers’ first leases expired. Not a single
electric car had actually been sold under the EV1 and its sister programs – car
manufacturers retained ownership of all vehicles. GM withdrew all EV1s from
circulation, without offering willing customers the option to renew their contracts,
and destroyed the vehicles. Although, as the documentary points out, there is
“no precedent of any car company rounding up every one of a particular kind of
a car and crushing them as if one of them might get away”, GM chose not to
listen to its customers and did just that.

It is
certainly odd in a market economy for one company to confiscate, destroy and
discontinue a product enthusiastically backed by consumers, but even the most
hard-nosed skeptic should smell a rat once confronted with video footage of
GM’s competitors Toyota
and Honda removing their own electric vehicles from their users and shredding
them in junkyards. In a further odd move, GM purchased controlling shares of companies
manufacturing electric car batteries, only to eventually sell those shares to
fossil fuel giant ChevronTexaco, which proceeded to silence previous owners’ attempts to market their batteries and to shut down production lines. This should also raise eyebrows faster
than you can say “conflict of interest”.

The documentary
holds that electric car was stealthily assassinated because interested parties
put their weight behind opposing it and quashed it before word about these
vehicles’ performance ever reached the general public. Meanwhile, the Earth’s
polar icecaps are still melting. Rational actors, it seems, do not always
produce rational outcomes. Just how much more achievable would the goal behind
the letter of the Kyoto Protocol be if the world boasted a fleet of
electric vehicles instead one of fossil fuel driven ones? According
to the International Energy Agency, 17% of total carbon dioxide emissions in
2006 stemmed from road transport. Of course, using an electric car would shift
emissions from this statistical category to that of electricity production,
but, even when drawing on electricity produced at the dirtiest of power
stations, electric cars outdid all internal combustion engines in terms of
ultimate energy efficiency.

Probably the most relevant point here is that cars are
driven in all of the world’s countries, so switching to electric cars would
actually elicit emissions cuts from developing countries as well, which
currently do not face any commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. Simply giving
consumers the possibility of driving better cars would go a longer way towards
achieving relevant emissions cuts than what decades of strenuous environmental
diplomacy have achieved to this day. The fact that Mitsubishi and Subaru are
announcing opening up production lines for electric cars in 2009 shows that the
now troubled US car manufacturers may have botched things a bit when they
discontinued the production of electrics. The superpower seems to be losing its
edge in more ways than one. Complacency is no
way to run a world.